Family is wonderful - from a distance

It's early yet, and the fall season will certainly bring some wonderful novels, but it seems safe to say that "Aloft" will be one of the best books of the year. Given the beauty of Chang-rae Lee's previous work, this isn't too surprising. In 1999, "A Gesture Life" appeared on many "best of the year" lists (including ours). Before that, his first novel, "Native Speaker" (1995), won several of those second-tier prizes that sometimes signal a great talent has entered the library.

Although the Korean-born author has written specifically about the Asian-American experience, Lee's audience has always been diverse, responding to his universal themes of dislocation and identity. With "Aloft," he moves even further from the outlines of his own cultural heritage, presenting a narrator who's Italian-American, a retired landscaper in an affluent suburb on Long Island.

But issues of race are still here - everywhere, in fact. The narrator, Jerry Battle (born Battaglia), notes everyone's ethnic and racial classification with the ironic self-consciousness of a white man who knows it's not kosher to note such things anymore.

He was married to a Korean woman who died 20 years ago; his Puerto Rican girlfriend has recently left him; his daughter is engaged to an Asian-American writer; he works part time with a young Hispanic man at a travel agency. In other words, Jerry is like most Americans, pretending to be colorblind in the most colorful country on earth.

Up in the sky, though, flying his little plane, he can't see anyone's face. It's a box-seat for a man who finds it easiest to appreciate people - particularly family - when gazing down on them from a "fetching, ever-mitigating" distance of 3,000 feet.

The novel opens with Jerry's Godlike pronouncement: "Everything looks perfect to me," and for the next 350 pages, he talks on and on to us in a voice that's maddeningly self-absorbed, wonderfully witty, constantly conflicted, often wise, and ultimately redeemed.

For many years, equipped with "a wide-range of people-shedding skills," Jerry has worked to secure the kind of isolation he's enjoying, but now living alone, cut off politely from his children and his father, he finds that the cup of absolute freedom has a bitter aftertaste.

He's not entirely sure why his girlfriend of 20 years walked out on him, but he suspects it may have something to do with keeping her a girlfriend for 20 years. His irascible, oversexed father is unhappily imprisoned in an expensive assisted-living facility, where Jerry has to visit only when the guilt becomes acute. His son has taken over the family landscaping business and turned it into a money machine that makes Jerry proud even while he worries "how this rush of prosperity is ruining him." And his daughter has a PhD in critical theory, which means that his hegemonic male privilege is the subject of her constant, dismissive analysis.

He backs away from moments of intimacy, even while craving them, complaining to us confidentially that "those closest to you seem to clam up at every chance of genuine kinship." How much neater, anyhow, to travel the world, sampling unencumbering moments of intimacy, leaping "to aid all manner of strangers and tourists and other wide-eyed foreigners."

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